You’ve created a product, built an email list, and decided how much revenue you’d like to generate each month.
But how many promotional emails will you actually need to send to reach that goal?
It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer without doing some calculations.
Working backwards from your revenue goal
Suppose you’re selling a digital product for $25 and want to generate $1,000 in monthly revenue.
That’s 40 sales.
But not everyone who visits your sales page will buy. If 2.5% of visitors make a purchase, you’ll need approximately 1,600 sales-page visits.
And not everyone who receives your promotional emails will click through.
With a 2% email click-through rate, generating those 1,600 visits would require approximately 80,000 delivered promotional emails.
If you have 2,000 subscribers, that’s the equivalent of 40 promotional emails per subscriber in a month.
Suddenly, that $1,000 revenue goal looks rather different.
Of course, these are illustrative figures. Actual results depend on your audience, offer, pricing, email performance and sales-page conversion rate.
But that’s precisely why it’s useful to explore the numbers before committing to a strategy.
Introducing the Email Sales Calculator
I’ve created a free tool to make these calculations easier.
The Email Sales Calculator lets you approach the problem from either direction.
Revenue Goal mode starts with your desired monthly revenue and works backwards to estimate the sales, sales-page visits and promotional emails required.
Existing Audience mode starts with the subscribers you already have and estimates the sales and revenue you might generate from a particular email frequency.
You can adjust the assumptions, select industry-based email click-through benchmarks, and explore different scenarios.
The calculator also highlights potentially excessive promotional email frequencies, so you can see when a revenue target might be unrealistic for your current audience.
Numbers, not promises
The calculator isn’t a revenue predictor, and its estimates aren’t guarantees.
Its purpose is to help you understand the relationships between your list size, email frequency, click-through rate, conversion rate, product price and revenue.
Sometimes the numbers will be encouraging. Sometimes they’ll suggest that increasing your prices, improving your sales page or growing your audience might be more practical than sending more emails.
Either way, you’ll have a clearer picture of what you’re asking your email marketing to achieve.
Try it for free
The Email Sales Calculator is available through Gumroad as a free, pay-what-you-want product.
[Get the free Email Sales Calculator]
No spreadsheets required. Just enter your numbers, adjust the assumptions and see what happens.
